


Material Girl

by gnomesb4trolls



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Eleven | Jane Hopper Needs A Hug, Family Feels, Shared Trauma, Siblings Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Will Byers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 06:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21094907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnomesb4trolls/pseuds/gnomesb4trolls
Summary: Eleven and Will both have nightmares. At least neither of them is alone.Or: Eleven lets herself want things, but her past never goes away.





	Material Girl

El had never had pajamas before. 

It wasn’t that Hopper hadn’t made sure that she’d had everything she needed, including clothes to sleep in (she had to keep telling herself this, because it felt disloyal to imply that he hadn’t, even to herself, in her own mind). She hadn’t always known what to ask for, was all. 

Joyce took her to a department store in a mall in their new town, a mall that looked too much like Starcourt and also not enough (it kept the bad memories muffled, but the good ones too), and she found out that there was a whole world of soft things that were just to sleep in. The set she picked out had tiny purple flowers on them, and lace around the neckline, and she froze for a second before she picked up the hanger because it felt like they should belong to another girl, a girl who’d always had a family and slept soundly at night and knew all of the words for things without anyone having to tell her. But she wanted them, and she was learning how to want things. 

(The things she wanted kept getting bigger and bigger: first freedom, then safety, then friends and Mike and Hopper and home and shopping and the whole world, every single thing that she’d never had, starting with pajamas)

As they walked out through the mall, bags in hand, she remembered that day with Max and how for the first time she’d felt like she could be a real girl, like she had someone other than Mike to tether her to the world, like maybe she could even learn to do it herself. 

Joyce looked at her face, and put an arm around her shoulder as they walked out into the weakening fall sunshine, but didn’t ask. 

She fell asleep that night in her new pajamas that smelled like laundry detergent and Joyce’s hands, and woke up in the dark, heart pounding in her throat as she tried to remember where she was and what was real. The streetlight outside cast a weak ray of yellow light, and as her eyes adjusted the room came into focus, bare carpet and bare walls, still too new to feel comforting. 

El sat on the couch in the empty living room, the only sound the quiet hum of the refrigerator coming from the kitchen, but it was enough. She concentrated on her breathing, in, out, in, out. 

She didn’t hear Will’s footsteps at first, not until he paused a few feet away from her, as if he didn’t want to get too close. She looked up at him, his face half in shadow. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” His hands hung loosely at his sides, but she could see his fingers wanting to curl into fists: something had woken him up too. 

She nodded. 

“Me neither.” 

He went into the kitchen and got out the milk, pouring himself a glass. She didn’t even realize he had poured a second one until he came over to the couch and handed it to her, keeping that careful distance between them. 

El waited for him to ask if she was OK, if she wanted to talk about it, but he didn’t. Instead he just sat down in the armchair, between her and the door. She lost track of how long they sat there, in the darkness that felt both familiar and strange. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but her body remembered: all of those nights in the cabin, listening for Hopper’s secret knock, waiting for the door to open. 

She still counted days, even though there was nothing to wait for. 

On the 17th night that they were both awake, Will sat on the couch instead of the chair, leaving as much space as he could between them. He could still watch the door over her shoulder, but now he was close enough that neither of them had to get up to pass comic books back and forth from the pile that had accumulated under the coffee table. 

On the 21st night they both fell asleep there, and Joyce found them like that when she got up to start breakfast, Will’s long legs flung up over the back of the couch, El’s cheek resting on a throw pillow. 

Will knew that on some nights she still needed him between her and the door, and El knew that on some nights he needed every blanket that they had waiting for him when he got up, to fight off the chill that he still felt sometimes, even though the Mind Flayer was long gone. 

(She’d always been the one to stand in front of them. “I can save them,” she’d said to Kali, and she had, until she couldn’t anymore. She’d never thought about what it would feel like to have someone stand in front of her, for once.) 

She also counted the days since Hopper, except when she forgot how to count, except when every word that he’d given her disappeared and she couldn’t do anything but stare at the wall and try not to remember. Those were the bad days, when she felt the black hole like a living thing, a shadow creeping over her that she couldn’t fight. 

There were good days too, though, days when she felt that dark place inside of her stretching to meet the sunlight. Days when she understood that it wasn’t that Hopper hadn’t been enough, or that Mike wasn’t, but that she could also have this: Jonathan teaching her words at the kitchen table after dinner, trying to catch her up so that she could go to school with Will, and Joyce touching the top of her head or her shoulder as they sat on the couch watching TV, and Will, watching the door for her, knowing what she needed without her having to find the words. 

On the 33rd night, she woke up with tears on her face, her whole body hollow with loss. Sometimes it happened like this: a stretch of good days, then waking in the dark as though it had just happened, as though it was still that night after Starcourt and she was sitting on the Byers’ couch, holding a mug of tea that she wouldn’t drink because moving was too hard, because if she moved it would be real. 

El went out to the living room, wiping her face on her pajama sleeve. She paused in the doorway: Will was already there, in the circle of yellow light cast by the lamp, flipping through a magazine. He looked up when he heard her footsteps, and she hesitated, feeling exposed in her soft pajamas, the tears still drying on her face, just a girl with no one left to save. 

He set down the magazine, and moved closer to the arm of the couch to make room for her. She sat, curling into a ball with her arms around her knees, smelling laundry detergent and Joyce and home and it’s real, it’s all real, but sometimes it wasn’t enough to tell herself that, sometimes it still felt like a dream, this life she hadn’t dared to want for so long. 

For the space of a few breaths Will just looked at her, waiting for the answer to a question he hadn’t asked. He moved so that he was facing her, only a foot or so of space between them. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. 

She took a ragged breath. “Yes.”


End file.
